


Tea

by unjax



Category: gen:LOCK (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 20:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17815346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unjax/pseuds/unjax
Summary: Cammie comes to Doctor Weller with a strange note.What's she been up to this time?





	Tea

“Dr. Weller?” 

He spun in his chair, eyebrow cocked. It was well after the day’s end. The recruits should have been sleeping. He looked at the dark shadows under Cammie’s eyes. 

She’d probably been in the Ether again. 

“Ms. MacCloud, how are you this evening?” He turned back to his computer, closed a few windows. One of the disadvantages of the recruits he’d had to choose for Gen:LOCK was that they would inevitably ask a lot of questions. Best not to distract them too much. 

Besides, he wanted their new toys to be a surprise. 

“Feelin’ a wee bit fuzzy,” she said. One of her ears flicked as her face scrunched up, like she was trying to figure something out. “And I’ve got this.”

It was a yellow sticky note. She held it out for him. Weller took it.

_ If you’re not sure why you have this, go talk to the Doctor. _

“Oh dear,” 

“Know what it means, doc?” 

He had a few ideas. Why couldn’t his recruits all just follow orders and not try things for themselves? 

Well… it was the whole point, wasn’t it? 

It did make the scientific process much more  _ trying _ . 

“Tell me Cammie, why have you been spending so much time in the Ether?” She looked annoyed. 

“Guess it feels familiar, don’t it? I get yanked halfway around the world to join some secret project, don’t get to say goodbye to my family, my friends, and don’t get to talk to them about what’s happening either. Little escape from reality never hurt anyone.”

A lie, but a rational one. Another disadvantage of neuro-plastic recruits. 

“Depends on how much you escape,” Weller murmured, half to himself.

“What’s this got to do with the note anyways?” Cammie sat in a huff. Weller waved at Caliban, who put the kettle on. 

Tea was good for easing the mind. The brews he’d brought were each popular in one of his candidates’ regions of origin. As well as mint. There was just something soothing about mint tea.

“A great deal Ms. MacCloud. A great deal indeed. Before the attack, you only thought to visit the Ether once. Of all the recruits, you were the one most stimulated by the new experiences. Don’t think I haven’t seen your mind working on the modifications you’d like to make.” 

Truth was, Weller hadn’t a clue what it was she was working on. But a programmer with a rebellious streak and an industrious mind… it was inevitable that she was working on  _ something _ .

Or at least that she had been. 

“I’m gonna string Migas up by the-”

“Migas hasn’t told me anything.” Weller cut her off. “You should avoid selling out your partners in crime.”

“... Don’t tell the boss lady?”

“Your secret is safe with me.” Weller smiled. Caliban’s timing with the tea was perfect. A connection, accented with a cup of tea. Hospitable as well as trustworthy. He decided to push it even further. “I look forward to seeing what you have planned. I always thought the Colonel’s design parameters were a bit too… utilitarian.”

“They look like trash cans with legs,” Cammie affirmed. “Legs that are freakishly long.” Weller laughed. 

“Well she does care a great deal about your safety. She wanted to… a what was it she said?  _ Protect her investment. _ ”

MacCloud’s face darkened. “Fat lot of good that did.”

Weller sipped his tea, waited until Cammie followed suit. 

“The Ether, then. Is that why you’re spending so much time there now?” 

Cammie knew what he was saying, feigned ignorance. “Not sure what you mean, Doc.”

She wasn’t ready to face it yet. Weller sighed. He studied the note. Why would she tell herself to come see him if she wound up not remembering her experiments, and not just tell herself she had deleted a memory?

He had a suspicion. 

“Trouble sleeping, is it? I hope the chamomile helps.” That did eek a smile out of her.

“Me mum used to give it to me when I would stay up too late.”

Weller felt warm. The tea had been far from a guarantee, but so were many of the things he had done to try and create a welcoming environment for the recruits. If you stacked up enough long shots, eventually some paid off. “You never did strike me as someone who spent a lot of time sleeping.”

“Rest of the team would disagree. They keep pushing me out of bed in the morning.”

“Because you’re sleeping in?” Cammie’s eyes narrowed. 

“Well, yes, but-”

“Only because you stay up so late?” Weller could relate. His early years of research had been much the same. Late to bed, late to rise. The military was less lenient with sleeping schedules.

“Been a lot of work to catch up on. If you’d let me take a look at the Gen:LOCK code it’d save me some time.” 

Weller felt uneasy about that. It had been years to develop the scripts, and half of them worked for reasons not entirely known to him. Science was as much a science as an art, he often reminded himself. The last thing he needed was Cammie poking around in a program that would mesh with her mind.

Although, she’d already started. 

“But you haven’t really been working on understanding Gen:LOCK lately, have you?” He wasn’t about to let her change topics so easily. Some part of her had wanted to talk to him, even before she’d started monkeying about in her brain. Hence the note. “You’ve been playing games in the Ether.”

“Something wrong with that? You know I’m still a kid.” Sacrificing her pride and image to mask the fear. Weller was beginning to suspect Cammie was too smart for her own good. 

“I want you to experience Gen:LOCK from a different perspective than I did. That’s why I’m not giving you the code yet.” It was part of it, anyways. “I built Gen:LOCK entirely from the outside. Much to my chagrin, I still don’t understand parts of it. I don’t know how the code translates to experience. You do.”

Weller stood and walked over to the small kitchenette in his office. Scooped some sugar into his tea. He took his time, letting the weight behind his next words build up. 

“I’m not going to be around forever Cammie. Ever since my technology was weaponized the Union has been coming for me. I won’t ever let them get ahold of what’s stored in my mind. With it, they could cause terrible destruction. It would be a fate worse than death.” He met her eyes, letting the words sink in. He saw her mind whirl, her mouth open to protest. He cut her off. “And besides that, I’m not exactly the spring chicken I once was. Maybe it will be the war, maybe it will be old age. Either way, there’s a good chance that the war won’t be done before I’m gone. If that’s to be the case, then I want to make sure Gen:LOCK is not only preserved, but advanced. When the war is over, I want it to launch humanity into its next great age. I believe it can do that, but not as it exists right now.”

“You want me to take over from you?” Cammie looked nervous. At the least, she was nervous about something other than the attack.

“It’s a lot to ask, I know. But you have the perfect skill set for it. You’re one of the last recruits I was able to sell the Colonel on, mostly because you had no combat experience. But what you bring to the team is just as important.”

He didn’t just mean that she could code. 

“Seems like a lot, doe’n’it?” She cupped her tea with both hands. The world always seemed less intimidating with a nice hot drink, Weller thought. 

“Scary, isn’t it?” Cammie didn’t answer, which was an answer itself. Weller sat back into his chair, across from the girl. Leaned forward, put a hand on her shoulder. “But I believe you can do it.”

Cammie took a sip of tea. She didn’t look as convinced as he pretended to be.

“So I learn what it’s like to be in Gen:LOCK. Once I figure that out, I can start understanding the code from the ground up. Build on it, expand it.” He could see her mind already toying with the problem. If she was like him, it would practically be instinct. The mind loves puzzles, it was what had led humanity for millennia. She was wonder what the core scripts were, what fundamentals would provide the skeleton for the technology? For Weller, it had been over a decade before he had even conceptualized of how Gen:LOCK could actually work, and then years of development after. For Cammie… she’d have an intimate understanding of the process before even looking at it.

He did genuinely believe she could make vast improvements to his code. Generalize the specific case he had been able to make into a working prototype. 

“I’m not asking for you to figure it all out now,” Weller assured. “But do you think you’d eventually be up to it? Continuing the research?”

“It’s not really about the robots, is it?” She wasn’t really listening to him now. She was problem solving. She was focused. 

Good.

“No, what is it about?”

“Creating an interface for the mind.” Cammie realized. He saw a spark in her eyes, the rush of grasping the first threads of a solution. 

“Exactly. Language was the first step. We created a vehicle to communicate what we were thinking, expanded it into what we were feeling. But it’s limited. Misunderstandings are rampant. Just think of how the union treats certain people.”  
“Like Valentina,” Cammie said.

“Indeed. It comes from not understanding. People fear what they don’t understand. But imagine if you could  _ feel _ what another person was feeling. Not an oblique explanation through the imperfect mechanism of speech, but directly feeling what they were. Experiencing it directly.”

“There might not have been a war.” 

Weller nodded. “I like to believe that if we all understood each other, than there would be no room left for hatred, for shame. I don’t know if it’s true or not, it could be that humans will always find a reason to separate themselves from each other. To be violent. But if there will ever be a way…”

“Gen:LOCK might be the first step.” He could see the tension evaporating from her shoulders. Her guard was coming down. 

“I’m not asking you to solve the whole problem, just like I’m not asking myself to. I just ask that you work at it, bring us closer. Do you think you could do that?”

There was steel in her voice. “Yes.”

He smiled. “See that? It’s not so scary once you understand it a bit.”

They sat in silence for a bit. He let Cammie stay there, in that determination. 

It was time for the hard part of the conversation.

“So Cammie, why are you spending so much time in the Ether now?”

Her fingers danced across her mug in a tapping rhythm.  _ Happy Birthday _ , he suspected. “You know why.”

It would take time for her to say it, but at least she wasn’t denying it anymore.

“Yes, it’s the same reason you left the note.” 

Confusion for a second, then she started putting it together. Then it fell apart and her shoulders slumped.

“I don’t really get it,” she admitted.

“You wouldn’t. You played with something you didn’t fully understand. Your mind is confused because of it.”

“What did I find?” She had at least gotten that far.

“A failsafe,” Weller told her. “The Colonel wanted to be certain that if any of you were captured the Union wouldn’t be able to salvage anything. The most valuable resource to them would be the knowledge and information each of you possess. Not just of Gen:LOCK, but of the entire set of operations at this base.”

He didn’t put the final pieces together for her. He’d given her two and two, time to see if she could make four.

As much as he wanted to ease the discomfort of her confusion, this was also an important learning moment. It was the first time he had seen this particular technology put to use. It had been the one he was most nervous of including. 

Cammie was smart. She had started with a minor tweak, but he needed to see how far the impact stretched. It was disproportionately large.

“I’m sorry Doctor, I don’t understand.”

“It’s alright, it’s not your fault. The failsafe is memory erasure. Gen:LOCK creates an imprint of your mind, transfers it to the Holon. The Holon is able to treat that imprint as code, adjust it. It allows us to add features. Aim assist, for example. But it also allows us to adjust and tweak the imprint. Block parts of it, even erase some. But memories aren’t a precise thing. The algorithm searches for the neural connections associated with that memory, destroys their connections. We refer to the process as pruning.”

“So… I deleted a memory?”

“You deleted the memory of deleting the memory.” Weller said. “It’s why you’re having trouble understanding it. The pruning went too far.”

Truly, it was a curse to be too good at his job, Weller decided.

Cammie was quiet for a moment, lost in thought. The tea kept her company. 

“One thing I can’t put together. It was a test, far as I can figure. I delete something small, then leave the note in case it works out strange. I wanted to see how it worked.”

“You’re curious. Fortunately, your more rabbit than cat, or it might have killed you.”

She cracked a smile. It evaporated immediately. 

“Why was I testing it? Why that feature? I must have come across others.”

Weller knew why.

Weller knew Cammie knew why.

But it wasn’t something he could force. She knew why, and it would come up again. He just hoped she chose right when the time came.

“I’m not sure,” he said instead. “But I trust when you figure it out, you’ll know what to do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
Weller smiled. “It means that I’m glad you’ll be the one to continue this project after me.”

Perhaps overcoming that small fear would let her overcome this much larger fear. Or at least not let her control it. 

“Sometimes I think you’re daft, doc.” She grumbled, but not unkindly. 

They chatted a bit longer before the chamomile kicked in and Weller sent Cammie off to bed.

He would not sleep tonight, but he hoped she did. 

And hoped her nightmares would not be too bad, would not push her to consider erasing them.

Weller just hoped she had learned from her experiment.

**Author's Note:**

> Written entirely for fun, to go through some head theories, and to try and get a lock on Weller's character. First attempt at writing a new fandom is strange. I just don't know the characters as well.
> 
> Would love to hear how people'd have done things differently. 
> 
> Takes place before today's episode, after the Gen:LOCK team's first mission.


End file.
